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Lot Essay
Painted in 1973, Wayne Thiebaud’s Cigar in Ashtray encapsulates the artist’s mastery of the still life. Combining an intoxicating mix of precision brushwork with an almost Fauve-like regard for color, the lone smoking cigar clearly commands the composition. Encased within a halo of fractured hues, the simple form captivates the eye with its prismatic qualities. Throughout his career Thiebaud repeatedly tackled ordinary and everyday objects as his subject matter, yet rather than merely replicating them, through his deft brushwork and unique understanding of color, his cakes, confectionary, and personal comestibles become things of quiet beauty. Both intimate and expressive, Cigar in Ashtray is a notable example from within the breadth of Thiebaud's oeuvre.
Compositionally, this work showcases the simple, geometric shapes of the cigar and ashtray emerging from the surface of the canvas. The artist’s thick layers of paint combined with the pureness and directness of geometric shapes make this a hallmark of the artist’s technique. Here, like many of Thiebaud’s other famous interpretations of commonplace objects, the artist leaves the viewer with a sense of mystery. A moment that would typically appear in a larger scene has been hyper-focused on. The background has been eliminated, forcing one to look extensively at the scene, and consider this significance. Though isolated, the artist is able to simultaneously harness a sense of presence, employing the subtle use of red paint, indicating the burning embers of a cigar waiting for its owner’s return. An ever so thin line of gray paint raising through the air before dissipating into the opaque background tells us that wherever the owner is, they are close by. Was the cigar abandoned? If so, what caused the user to flee? Or are they intending to come back to it, standing in the background, so close but so far from out of our sight? Or perhaps the viewer is the smoker, standing before the ashtray in the middle of a conversation.
Throughout history, artists have constantly used the genre of still-life to refine their technique and hone their skills. Thiebaud, like many artists of his generation, challenged that idea and worked to redefine what we know as “high art.” A contemporary of Thiebaud, Andy Warhol was best known for his depictions of American consumerism, and arguably most famous for his numerous renderings of Campbell’s Soup cans. Paintings like this defined the era of Pop Art that accompanied Thiebaud in his career. Although defiantly not a Pop artist, Thiebaud takes the idea of the movement and adds his own sense of nostalgia with a flare of age old techniques.
In his still-life paintings, Thiebaud approaches a timeless artistic genre with a fresh eye. The artist, like those before him, follows the convention of painting based upon observation and our perceived truths about said object. However, the simplified scheme and rich impasto of the present work far extends the boundaries one sees in the everyday. The contour lines are accentuated with accents of cool blues and purples, vibrant greens and pops of yellow, almost as if looking through a kaleidoscope. Despite this imaginative rendering, there is no question of this work's subject matter, rather there is a question of its significance.
As shown in Cigar and Ashtray, Thiebaud’s work goes far beyond that of the average Pop artist. He has proven that his paintings are more than just a snap-shot of consumer goods, but a celebration of life and the intricacies that exist within its even greatest simplicities. His body of work encompasses a culture frozen in time, living on through his brush strokes, making it so not even a burning cigar will be overlooked when analyzing the canon of art history and the experience of being alive.
Compositionally, this work showcases the simple, geometric shapes of the cigar and ashtray emerging from the surface of the canvas. The artist’s thick layers of paint combined with the pureness and directness of geometric shapes make this a hallmark of the artist’s technique. Here, like many of Thiebaud’s other famous interpretations of commonplace objects, the artist leaves the viewer with a sense of mystery. A moment that would typically appear in a larger scene has been hyper-focused on. The background has been eliminated, forcing one to look extensively at the scene, and consider this significance. Though isolated, the artist is able to simultaneously harness a sense of presence, employing the subtle use of red paint, indicating the burning embers of a cigar waiting for its owner’s return. An ever so thin line of gray paint raising through the air before dissipating into the opaque background tells us that wherever the owner is, they are close by. Was the cigar abandoned? If so, what caused the user to flee? Or are they intending to come back to it, standing in the background, so close but so far from out of our sight? Or perhaps the viewer is the smoker, standing before the ashtray in the middle of a conversation.
Throughout history, artists have constantly used the genre of still-life to refine their technique and hone their skills. Thiebaud, like many artists of his generation, challenged that idea and worked to redefine what we know as “high art.” A contemporary of Thiebaud, Andy Warhol was best known for his depictions of American consumerism, and arguably most famous for his numerous renderings of Campbell’s Soup cans. Paintings like this defined the era of Pop Art that accompanied Thiebaud in his career. Although defiantly not a Pop artist, Thiebaud takes the idea of the movement and adds his own sense of nostalgia with a flare of age old techniques.
In his still-life paintings, Thiebaud approaches a timeless artistic genre with a fresh eye. The artist, like those before him, follows the convention of painting based upon observation and our perceived truths about said object. However, the simplified scheme and rich impasto of the present work far extends the boundaries one sees in the everyday. The contour lines are accentuated with accents of cool blues and purples, vibrant greens and pops of yellow, almost as if looking through a kaleidoscope. Despite this imaginative rendering, there is no question of this work's subject matter, rather there is a question of its significance.
As shown in Cigar and Ashtray, Thiebaud’s work goes far beyond that of the average Pop artist. He has proven that his paintings are more than just a snap-shot of consumer goods, but a celebration of life and the intricacies that exist within its even greatest simplicities. His body of work encompasses a culture frozen in time, living on through his brush strokes, making it so not even a burning cigar will be overlooked when analyzing the canon of art history and the experience of being alive.